In a recent post I wrote about ‘parts-n-pieces’ being tried-out as design elements. These are some of the ones that were considered for the Connemara Window piece but they just didn’t make it for a variety of reasons.
‘Parts-n-pieces’ elements awaiting placement in the right work:
Etruscan flat woman butt - cast bronze with verdigris patina - 2½" high - this was modeled and cast during one of my teaching trips to Italy after seeing several small ‘flattened’ votive figurines in a local archeological museum. From memory I modeled a pair in wax and then cast in bronze copies of two of the ones on display in the museum. They depicted female and male figures without limbs or heads but where the bodies are stylized into simple rectilinear forms with buttocks and genitalia on each respective side. This one originally had a mons pubis on the other side but it also had a flaw - a large bubble - so I ground it off flat so this could be more easily used as a one-sided element. This side has a bubble too, but as it is on the bottom of the butt it doesn’t spoil the view . . . <grin> I’ll post pictures of a double-sided male figurine in a later post.
dyed and eroded plaster fragment - about 2" wide - this was a fragment of a plaster casting that had been left outdoors open to the elements for several years. Plaster slowly dissolves in rainwater, eroding becoming more porous and delicate. The casting broke. This fragment was trimmed to a flat back and flat edge at right, then dyed with red and yellow pigments. Extremely fragile, this will have to be shown under glass - this was a contender for the shadowbox in Connemara Window.
crab shell cut into a rectangle - about 3" high - found on the beach in coastal Georgia, cut into a rectangle with a small diamond saw. Also very fragile, when I use crab shell parts they are usually filled with something to strengthen them (plaster, fiberglass, polyester resin filler, etc.).
cropped belly of African carving of a man - Gaboon ebony - about 6" wide - from a broken and discarded African carving of a man originally standing about 16″ high. The figure was cut up into about ten pieces — the longest arm was fashioned into a clay modeling tool — and several others have been added to sculptures already. This belly was the single largest piece, it was contoured and sanded to 220 grit, leaving the ‘outsie’ belly button untouched.
rectangle of cast bronze - with patina - about 6" wide - this part of one of my foundry student’s failed/discarded castings, thrown back into the scrap bronze pile so he didn’t have to pay for it. I cut it down into a rectangle and paid for it. The patina developed naturally from being left outdoors for a month or so in the scrap-pile.
cut fragment from a 19th century Chinese opium or wedding bed - lacquered wood - about 6" wide - when my parents were first married and living in an apartment with a new baby (me) in a house owned by my grandparents my mother took a delivery for my grandfather and she was surprised to have to sign for delivery of ‘opium beds’. Grandfather had purchased a couple of antique Chinese ‘Opium’ or ‘Wedding Beds’ that were in disassembled parts. They had intricately carved openwork depicting stories from Chinese legends or mythology. The figures in the carvings were all about four inches high and lacquered in red black and then highlighted in gold leaf. Many years later my father took these disassembled parts and made furniture elements with them — a pair of mirror frames for the hallway, a headboard for their bed, and several framed carvings as decorative wall hangings. My father gave me all the leftover fragmentary pieces which were too damaged to employ successfully. A number of these have been used as ‘found-object’ elements in sculpture over the years. This small fragment is one of perhaps ten pieces remaining. In another post I’ll show some of the carvings themselves, presented as my father displayed them.
cast bronze spill - with verdigris patina - about 3" wide - when casting bronze there are inevitable spills when pouring into the lost-wax molds buried upside-down in the sand. It is not unusual because the pouring team are students who have never cast bronze before. The Crucible holding the molten bronze weighs about 300 lbs, Added to that is the steel pouring frame which is another 50 lbs., so the two students are each carrying about 175 lbs. while they pour about ten molds — no rest or breaks until the crucible is empty. The average class enrollment for foundry in the studies abroad program is 7 female to 3 male students. But most of the students welcome the challenge to be on the all volunteer pouring team. It is exhausting work, so the occasional spill is expected. After the molds have cooled (about eight hours) and the students have taken the molds away to open them and see how their castings came out, I would rake the sand pile for retrieving the spills. Most of the spills would simply go into back into the scrap bronze pile and get re-melted in the next bronze pour, but sometimes I would save an unusual spill as a potential element in a future sculpture. Being as small and thin as this spill was it probably cost me less than fifty lira (about 25 cents). The cost is figured by the kilo. To see the process of bronze casting from modeling to finished bronze visit my web page: http://www.dondougan.com/cortonaPAGE.html
striated oval thigh disk - polished Gaboon ebony - about 1½" wide - when I cut apart the broken ebony carving of the man (see the cropped belly above) I used a band saw with fairly coarse teeth. This disk was at the top of one of his thighs, the texture left by the wobble of the band saw teeth. It was then polished with emery on a cotton buffing wheel.
positive casting from a dismantled sculpture - cast polyester resin with embedded piece of Carrara marble - about 5″ wide - Perhaps about twenty-five years ago I made an eight-foot wide outdoor sculpture in limestone in which were cut a series of rectangular recesses, each of which was then fitted with a different material. In one recess was fitted a slab of bardiglio marble with a natural wavelike texture. The bottom of the slab was irregular, and to get a nice fit for the adhesive a small pebble of marble was placed and then filled around it was polyester body filler into which the marble slab was pressed while still soft. Years later when the wooden elements of the sculpture had deteriorated so badly by the weather the sculpture was dismantled for parts. The bardiglio slab popped out of the recess whole, leaving this polyester casting of the space between the marble and the limestone. The surface you see was cast from the bottom of the limestone recess, you can see the tooth chisel marks as little rows of dash-like bumps in the positive casting.
rectangular slab of Cobb County foliated talc - about 6" high - over thirty years ago when the intersection of I-75 and I-285 was being reworked some light colored stone was being dug away for one of the arcs of the cloverleaf. A small bolder of the light colored stone was retrieved from the site and It turned out to be foliated talc — a type of soapstone known for its distinctive grain-like texture. It is very soft, and because of its grain it often disintegrates while being cut. That small 10″ boulder has been cut into many small slabs over the years to be fitted to perhaps a half dozen sculptures. This is the last piece left, and to reinforce its friable nature the bottom side of the slab has been laminated to a piece of metal with epoxy. The metal plate has been soldered to a couple of T-nuts to allow fastening to the sculptural matrix.
To sum up this post I freely admit to being a ‘packrat’ — scavenging things of interest wherever I happen to find them. Then I just have to trust my intuition to find out how and where to use them in sculpture.